A pilot program has been written to find noun phrases in English text. Potentially, such a program might be useful as a step in automatically indexing text or in performing information retrieval from English language data bases. In general, the program executes as follows: Each word of text is looked up in a dictionary containing at present about 27,000 words and phrases. If found, part of speech possibilities are taken from the dictionary entry. If not found, the word is examined for prefixes, suffixes, and inflectional endings, and an attempt is made to derive the word from a word in the dictionary. A part of speech may be deduced from a suffix, an inflectional ending, and/or properties of a base word. Otherwise, an unknown word is assumed to be a noun. Each word of text is then considered in its context and with its possible parts of speech, and rules of syntax are applied to determine an actual part of speech, or else to reduce the part of speech possibilities. When a sentence is complete, the program scans it for possible noun phrases. The program is not based upon any mathematical model of language, and it does not produce a complete parse of a sentence showing all relationships between words. Problems encountered by conventional parsers are avoided (e.g., resolving ambiguity, determining antecedents of pronouns), and indeed are considered irrelevant to the program's goal of finding noun phrases. Because the program cannot always determine a word's part of speech, the program cannot find noun phrases exactly, and it is designed to err on the side of finding noun phrases that are too long. In any system that employs the program, it is anticipated that subsequent steps could be taken to refine the noun phrases that are produced.